I just happened to be reading "A Law of Acceleration" by Henry Adams  
and have come across two paragraphs that have some relation to what we  
have been discussed on the issue of varying sentence openings and  
coherence.

The first paragraph begins with "Thus" and the sentence concludes  
"only the mathematician could help."  Here are the first words (NPs)  
of the remaining six sentences:

             La Place

             Watt

             Volta and Benjamin Franklin

             Dalton

             Napoleon I

             No one



The other starts with the word "Nothing."  The remaining five  
sentences begin:

             Thought

             Power

             Man

             Forces

             So long as the rates of progress held good, . . . .



Comments?



Ed S


On May 27, 2009, at 8:02 PM, Jordan Earl wrote:

> Can I throw in a question here?  The revised version seems to me to  
> create a new problem... we have only one sentence with a varying  
> start now, and in it, the subject is a pronoun referring back to an  
> adjective in the previous sentence.  I realize that this phenomenon  
> is acceptable in spoken speech and probably happens a lot in  
> writing, but I'm wondering if others out there teaching would point  
> this out to students or let it go...
>
> <Landon is comparing Jamie’s weight to leaves falling.  She has  
> become so sick that she has lost a lot of weight, and he has really  
> started to notice it.>
>
> It seems to me that *she* would work well if Landon were female;  
> alternately, one might begin the second sentence with *Jamie* and  
> solve the problem, as the 2nd *she* would then be clear.
>
> Curious what others think --
> --Jordan
>
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